There are a number of websites that you, as a web designer, will use on a daily basis making life easier and making you more efficient.
Here is a list of 10 websites (in no particular order) that I find useful and am constantly using. I’m also interested in what websites you swear by and use all the time, so please share in the comments below.
Handcrafted CSS is by one of the web design industries’ most established authors, Dan Cederholm. He is the man behind Bulletproof Web Design, Web Standards Solutions, Simple Bits and most recently Dribbble.
Last week I launched a holding page for Ecliptic Labs, an iPhone development company based in Belfast (keep an eye on them, there’s going to be some great stuff from them this year).
Here is the holding page in all it’s glory.
Different colours mean different things to us and by using colour we can associate feelings and actions to certain situations.
There are a lot of different titles associated with being a web designer. Lately I’ve been thinking about what exactly my job title is, so when someone asks me “What do you do?” I reply with my “official” answer.
Starting off with my first book review of the year.
I was very excited to hear about a Smashing Magazine (SM) book, entitled ‘The Smashing Book’. SM is undoubtedly the number one web designer’s resource on the web. Whenever I need to find something, it’s the first place I go to look. It covers all aspects of web design and has some great authors who put a lot of effort into their writing.
Every year I take a look back at the past 12 months and set some goals for the year ahead. It’s good to get it down on paper (or screen) and by making it public there’s more chance of actually following through.
As a web designer it’s hard to get the user experience design right first time, you never know how users are going to use the site or how big a difference small iterations will make, so it’s important to test the user experience and try out different solutions. That’s where A/B testing comes in.
As a freelance web designer it makes sense to have a number of documents prepared as you tend to use the same ones over and over again. I thought I would share with you the 5 documents that I have prepared and ready to use, along with some excellent examples from other designers and studios.
Last Thursday I had the pleasure of attending Build, a web design conference organised by Andy Good and held in our very own backyard (literally 2 minutes round the corner from me in Belfast).